Instagram Inks $100 Million Advertising Deal With Omnicom

Instagram introduced the first paid ads last year, handpicking a few companies it thought users would be happy to see pop-up in their photo stream. Now the Facebook-owned company has signed a massive new contract with Omnicom Media, which could earn the social networking giant as much as $100 million this year.

Omnicom is a massive company with dozens of smaller advertising agencies working under it, so there’s no way to predict what kind of ads we’ll see pop up on the app this year. According to Instagram director of market operations Jim Squires, they’ll be in line with what we’ve seen before, though apparently the company is also getting ready to introduce the first video ads from certain sponsors.

“This doesn’t change our advertising strategy moving forward — people will continue to see a limited number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from select brands who already have a strong presence on Instagram,” he said in a statement to AdAge.

Instagram’s ads so far haven’t been very obtrusive, and to be honest we’ve only seen one or two in total. However, it looks like the company is ready to kick its new ad platform into high gear with this new deal. Hopefully that doesn’t mean our favorite photo-sharing app is about to get bombarded with sponsored posts like Facebook’s main feed already is. Based on Instagram’s recent statements, it won’t be.